It has been a while since we released 17.3 release where we fixed several issues. Now the time has come to do another where we tackled several more issues that were identified. Although we already moved on with development towards v18 we do take the time to fix issues for the current release when we can. To give these fixes a proper test run before we call it final we first want to make this release candidate available for the wider audience who might be facing some of these issues we have fixed. Just browse the list below and give it a try.

Fixes done in this release:

• Potentially fix crashing on Windows due to an issue in Python
• Potentially fix crashing on Windows when enabling zeroconf
• Fix sporadic crash on Windows when installing or updating add-ons 
• Fix issue for users with reverse proxies attempting to forward websockets.
• Fix possible issue if Linux distro uses system ffmpeg and cause black screen with 10-bit H.265
• Properly throttle scraping music information online to prevent overloading the provider
• Fix native keyboard on iOS 11
• Fix potential crash on Android O loading App icons
• Fix non showing Kodi banner on Android O
• Fix potential crash on Android with certain keymaps
• Fix wrong detection of VP6 and VP8 videocodec on Android
• Update FFmpeg to 3.1.9
• Set hard requirement to use FFmpeg 3.1.x only
• Fix for Hangup when viewing recording and pressing next/previous
• Fix merge scraped album type and label correctly with that derived from tags from music files

What else is new?

In the bugfix releases we never include any new features. They are as feature complete as the initial version with the difference is they contain stability and usability fixes. If you are curious you can read up on all the v17 changes here: Kodi v17.0 “Krypton”

Where can I download Kodi?

As alway you can find the official builds on our download page. Then click on the platform of choice and choose pre release build. You can install these build just on top of your current Kodi installation without doing a reinstall or cleanup as we do a full migration if needed. All you add-ons or installed skin will keep working.

Apparel, donations or getting involved

Getting involved is quite easy. We encourage you to report problems with these builds on our forum first and after that, if asked, submit bugs on Trac (following this guide: How to submit a bug report). Do note that we need detailed information so we can investigate the issue. We also appreciate providing support in our Forums where you can. You can of course also follow or help promote Kodi on all available social networks. Read more on the get involved page. We are always happy to receive a donation by which you show your support and appreciation, and t-shirts and Raspberry Pi cases may still be found on the sidebar for purchase. All donations and other income goes towards the XBMC foundation and are typically used for travel to attend conferences, any necessary paperwork and legal fees, purchasing necessary hardware and licenses for developers and hopefully the yearly XBMC Foundation Developers Conference.

Source link

Reports of sites becoming mysteriously inaccessible in India have been a regular occurrence over the past several years. In many cases, sites simply stop functioning, leaving users wondering whether sites are actually down or whether there’s a technical issue.

Due to their increasing prevalence, fingers are often pointed at so-called ‘John Doe’ orders, which are handed down by the court to prevent Internet piracy. Often sweeping in nature (and in some cases pre-emptive rather than preventative), these injunctions have been known to block access to both file-sharing platforms and innocent bystanders.

Earlier this week (and again for no apparent reason), the world renowned Internet Archive was rendered inaccessible to millions of users in India. The platform, which is considered by many to be one of the Internet’s most valued resources, hosts more than 15 petabytes of data, a figure which grows on a daily basis. Yet despite numerous requests for information, none was forthcoming from authorities.

The ‘blocked’ message seen by users accessing Archive.org

Quoted by local news outlet Medianama, Chris Butler, Office Manager at the Internet Archive, said that their attempts to contact the Indian Department of Telecom (DoT) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) had proven fruitless.

Noting that their site had previously been blocked in India, Butler said they were no clearer on the reasons why the same kind of action had seemingly been taken this week.

“We have no information about why a block would have been implemented,” he said. “Obviously, we are disappointed and concerned by this situation and are very eager to understand why it’s happening and see full access restored to archive.org.”

Now, however, the mystery has been solved. The BBC says a local government agency provided a copy of a court order obtained by two Bollywood production companies who are attempting to slow down piracy of their films in India.

Issued by a local judge, the sweeping order compels local ISPs to block access to 2,650 mainly file-sharing websites, including The Pirate Bay, RARBG, the revived KickassTorrents, and hundreds of other ‘usual suspects’. However, it also includes the URL for the Internet Archive, hence the problems with accessibility this week.

The injunction, which appears to be another John Doe order as previously suspected, was granted by the High Court of the Judicature at Madras on August 2, 2017. Two film productions companies – Prakash Jha Productions and Red Chillies Entertainment – obtained the order to protect their films Lipstick Under My Burkha and Jab Harry Met Sejal.

While India-based visitors to blocked resources are often greeted with a message saying that domains have been blocked at the orders of the Department of Telecommunications, these pages never give a reason why.

This always leads to confusion, with news outlets having to pressure local government agencies to discover the reason behind the blockades. In the interests of transparency, providing a link to a copy of a relevant court order would probably benefit all involved.

A few hours ago, the Internet Archive published a statement questioning the process undertaken before the court order was handed down.

“Is the Court aware of and did it consider the fact that the Internet Archive has a well-established and standard procedure for rights holders to submit take down requests and processes them expeditiously?” the platform said.

“We find several instances of take down requests submitted for one of the plaintiffs, Red Chillies Entertainments, throughout the past year, each of which were processed and responded to promptly.

“After a preliminary review, we find no instance of our having been contacted by anyone at all about these films. Is there a specific claim that someone posted these films to archive.org? If so, we’d be eager to address it directly with the claimant.”

But while the Internet Archive appears to be the highest profile collateral damage following the ISP blocks, it isn’t the only victim. Now that the court orders have become available (1,2), it’s clear that other non-pirate entities have also been affected including news site WN.com, website hosting service Weebly, and French ISP Free.fr.

Also, in a sign that sites aren’t being checked to see if they host the movies in question, one of the orders demands that former torrent index BitSnoop is blocked. The site shut down earlier this year. The same is true for Shaanig.org.

This is not the first time that the Internet Archive has been blocked in India. In 2014/2015, Archive.org was rendered inaccessible after it was accused of hosting extremist material. In common with Google, the site copies and stores huge amounts of data, much of it in automated processes. This can leave it exposed to these kinds of accusations.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Source link

There is little doubt that, in the United States, Netflix has become the standard for watching movies on the Internet.

The subscription service is responsible for a third of all Internet traffic during peak hours, dwarfing that of online piracy and other legal video platforms.

It’s safe to assume that Netflix-type streaming services are among the best and most convenient alternative to piracy at this point. There is a problem though. The whole appeal of the streaming model becomes diluted when there are too many ‘Netflixes.’

Yesterday, Disney announced that it will end its partnership with Netflix in 2019. The company is working on its own Disney-branded movie streaming platforms, where titles such as Frozen 2 and Toy Story 4 will end up in the future.

Disney titles are among the most-watched content on Netflix, and the company’s stock took a hit when the news came out. In a statement late yesterday, Disney CEO Bob noted that the company has a good relationship with Netflix but the companies will part ways at the end of next year.

At the moment no decision has been made on what happens to Lucasfilm and Marvel films, but these could find a new home as well. Marvel TV shows such as Jessica Jones and Luke Cage will reportedly stay at Netflix

Although Disney’s decision may be good for Disney, a lot of Netflix users are not going to be happy. It likely means that they need another streaming platform subscription to get what they want, which isn’t a very positive prospect.

In piracy discussions, Hollywood insiders often stress that people have no reason to pirate, as pretty much all titles are available online legally. What they don’t mention, however, is that users need access to a few dozen paid services, to access them all.

In a way, this fragmentation is keeping the pirate ecosystems intact. While legal streaming services work just fine, having dozens of subscriptions is expensive, and not very practical. Especially not compared to pirate streaming sites, where everything can be accessed on the same site.

The music business has a better model, or had initially. Services such as Spotify allowed fans to access most popular music in one place, although that’s starting to crumble as well, due to exclusive deals and more fragmentation.

Admittedly, for a no-name observer, it’s easy to criticize and point fingers. The TV and movie business is built on complicated licensing deals, where a single Netflix may not be able to generate enough revenue for an entire industry.

But there has to be a better way than simply adding more streaming platforms, one would think?

Instead of solely trying to stamp down on pirate sites, it might be a good idea to take a careful look at the supply side as well. At the moment, fragmentation is keeping pirate sites relevant.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Source link

For more than a decade, copyright holders have been sending ISPs takedown notices to alert them that their subscribers are sharing copyrighted material.

Under US law, providers have to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers “in appropriate circumstances” and increasingly they are being held to this standard.

Earlier this year several major record labels, represented by the RIAA, filed a lawsuit in a Texas District Court, accusing ISP Grande Communications of failing to take action against its pirating subscribers.

The ISP is not happy with the claims and was quick to submit a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. One of the arguments is that the RIAA’s evidence is insufficient.

In its original motion, Grande doesn’t deny receiving millions of takedown notices from piracy tracking company Rightscorp. However, it believes that these notices are flawed as Rightscorp is incapable of monitoring actual copyright infringements.

The RIAA disagreed and pointed out that their evidence is sufficient. They stressed that Rightcorp is able to monitor actual downloads, as opposed to simply checking if a subscriber is offering certain infringing content.

In a response from Grande, late last week, the ISP argues that this isn’t good enough to build a case. While Rightcorp may be able to track the actual infringing downloads to which the RIAA labels hold the copyrights, there is no such evidence provided in the present case, the ISP notes.

“Importantly, Plaintiffs do not allege that Rightscorp has ever recorded an instance of a Grande subscriber actually distributing even one of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works. Plaintiffs certainly have not alleged any concrete facts regarding such an act,” Grande’s legal team writes (pdf).

According to the ISP, the RIAA’s evidence merely shows that Rightscorp sent notices of alleged infringements on behalf of other copyright holders, who are not involved in the lawsuit.

“Instead, Plaintiffs generally allege that Rightscorp has sent notices regarding ‘various copyrighted works,’ encompassing all of the notices sent by Rightscorp on behalf of entities other than Plaintiffs.”

While the RIAA argues that this circumstantial evidence is sufficient, the ISP believes that there are grounds to have the entire case dismissed.

The record labels can’t hold Grande liable for secondary copyright infringement, without providing concrete evidence that their works were actively distributed by Grande subscribers, the company claims.

“Plaintiffs cannot allege direct infringement without alleging concrete facts which show that a Grande subscriber actually infringed one of Plaintiffs’ copyrights,” Grande’s lawyers note.

“For this reason, it is incredibly misleading for Plaintiffs to repeatedly refer to Grande having received ‘millions’ of notices of alleged infringement, as if those notices all pertained to Plaintiffs’ asserted copyrights.”

The “misleading” copyright infringement evidence argument is only one part of the ISPs defense. The company also notes that it has no control over what its subscribers do, nor do they control the BitTorrent clients that were allegedly used to download content.

If the court ruled otherwise, Grande and other ISPs would essentially be forced to become an “unpaid enforcement agent of the recording industry,” the company’s lawyers note.

The RIAA, however, sees things quite differently.

The music industry group believes that Grande failed to take proper action in response to repeat infringers and should pay damages to compensate the labels. This claim is very similar to the one BMG brought against Cox, where the latter was eventually ordered to pay $25 million.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Source link

Next we have Arpit’s work upgrading Kodi’s add-on backend from Python2 to Python3

Python3 Support – arpitn30

My initial proposal was to support both Python2 and Python3 in Kodi by maintaining two versions of the same libraries and calling the required one depending upon the meta information in the XML files of the add-ons.

JUNE

During the first week of June, I was mostly understanding how everything was being built and what needs to be changed. I initially thought of updating the input to swig so that it can output python3, but I realised that Swig only changed the code to generic ML code which was given as an input to Groovy which with the help of Python Templates outputs Python code. So I cloned the Python templates directory and in the later weeks, I started to study and gradually change the python templates to that of Python3.

Aside from the major unicode string change, Python 3 changed a lot of things at the base level that drastically affected the Python-C API which was used to build the templates. So I went through each and every function and decided if it should return a unicode object or a byte object. I changed all the Python API function names, the module initialization, the Py_TPFLAGS, and changed the char data type in C to wchar data type. I also looked at all the data type which were being converted from C to Python and Python to C and inspected if any changes to data types in Python 3 like ‘map’ returning and iterable instead of lists and also changed the PyInt type which was no longer being used in Python3 API.

During the mid of June, when I started working to support both versions of Python, I was told to test if my code supported was even working with Python3 or not. So I forked my current working branch into 2 branches, one to test if my Python3 templates work correctly (testpy3) and the other to support both Python 2 and 3 (build2n3) and was working on them simultaneously. I also updated the HttpNetworkHandlers to Python3.

In Build2n3 branch, I changed paths of the Python libraries to the new Python3 directory, updated the Cmake files to download dependencies for both and keep them seperate.

In testpy3 branch, my main focus was to run the environment with as minimal changes as possible. So I removed 2 python template directories and made python3 the main directory. I had to change all the cmake files though to the updated dependency structure. After all the kinks had been removed Kodi was able to run with Python3 at the end of Phase 1 but the add-ons weren’t working yet.

JULY

The first thing I needed to do after the end of Phase 1 was to get the Python3 version of Kodi working, so that I could know if my code was working or not. The major trouble was that there wasn’t any way to know the error except the for only Log Entry of PythonModules not found. I skimmed through each and every documentation to figure out the changes which were made and the difference between them.

I found that the threads and GIL in Python3 are implemented differently than Python2. The acquirelock and releaselock functions are now deprecated and had to be changed with acquirethread which needed to have a saved state beforehand.

But the problem about the threads was still not solved. After a lot of testing and help from Paxxi and Rechi, we were able to identify the problem which was due to the duplication of state of _PyThreadState_current by Kodi and Python Bindings which resulted in the thread state being lost mid execution and we solved the problem by changing the cmake file in templates and adding the python binding directly to the xbmc core library.

After that, I started working on Build2n3 branch to apply the changes which were done in testpy3 branch and to figure out if it was possible to create two versions of libraries with the different implementation of threads even though it meant building Kodi twice while I was still looking into the ModuleNotFound error in the other branch which was still not resolved.

So I started working on Build2n3 branch. The problem I was having was with the env variables like PythonLibs and Python_include_dirs which can be only set to one of the versions at a time so we had to unset the variables after they were used and set them to the python3 directory. 

The main point now was if it was practical to go for a version that supports both Python 2 and 3 or skip a version and release just a python3 version whle giving the developers time to port. Changing a major amount of code just to support Python 2 and 3 only to revert it back to the current code one or two versions later seemed impractical if not impossible due to changing the implementation of handling of threads. Taking in account the time it took, just to find the bug and get just the Python3 version right, Razze asked me to focus on just Python3 version for now.

So going back to testpy3 branch, after searching for several days, we found out that the function which initialized the modules did not add it to the built-in modules in Python3 which wasn’t mentioned in most of the Python3 Porting guides. So we added statements to explicitly add it to built-in modules. And finally the ModuleNotFound error was gone.

After fixing a few bugs like correcting the charset conversion to wchar, updating the execution script, Python 3 Kodi was finally working with the built-on Kodi libraries being perfectly imported. 

In the next week, I checked the best way to make Kodi add-ons compatible with both versions of Python either by using __future__ packages or by using sys.major_version condition and I decided to go with the latter. I also made the versioncheck addon compatible with Python3 and added a pr to it. The addon was working perfectly with current version of Kodi as well as the Python3 version of Kodi.

Lastly, I decided to update the Python3 branch with the changes which were later made in the templates while working to support just Python3. So if we decide to go for a version to support both Python2 and 3, we can just fork from there. 

I also added the PyFile function into Kodi itself thus removing the dependency on Py3c fileshim.h.

I also tested the debug and release versions of Python3 Kodi on Windows 64 bit and it worked without any problems.

The Future

I’ve tested my code with Ubuntu using the natively installed packages and it seems to work. And after a few days, I’ve been able to build the master branch in Linux using the target packages only. I intend to finish updating the files for target version for Posix systems by the end of next week. I will port some of the add-ons to Python3 later on, and I need some time to clean up the code as well. Although I removed the commented code which I left behind from Python2, I still have to give it a final review before submitting my code. 

Source link